Wednesday, November 30, 2011

So, from the beginning. We decided to do the demolition and contracting ourselves. After getting a general idea in our heads about what we wanted to do, we met with a kitchen designer for an hour and just confirmed that all of our ideas were correct, and she drew up a quick blueprint so we could get started.

Here's a quick lots-of-pictures post.

The night before demo-day we cleared everything out of the kitchen.

Clearing out the appliances and cabinets only took a couple of hours.

We found this credit card statement behind one of the cabinets. I hope they didn't forget to pay their bill...

Then began the dirty work. Thanks to our friend, Ben Russell, for helping out during this part.

Also included in the kitchen project was the laundry room. We couldn't properly cook or wash clothes or dishes for about 3 months. Awesome! We knocked out a closet that opened to the garage and added the space to the laundry room.

After finding some rotted subfloor under the cabinets, we decided to replace all of the subfloors. We also got them 1/8" thinner so we could make the hardwoods in the adjoining rooms flush with the kitchen floor... how's that for detail?

We added insulation because everything fell on our faces during demolition.

We hired out the drywall work. I have crossed "doing drywall" from my bucket list.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Goodness, we need to update this thing! Things have been going well-- just trudging through the house repairs. We are officially down to four rooms left to renovate: both bathrooms, the kitchen and the utility room.

Here is the front living room's before shot:

And the after:

We really, really like the way it turned out, and we finally got to cover up that horrendous red accent wall!

The back living room is still in progress, but it's unbelievably different. Before:

And kind of after:

The photo's a bit burry and there's obviously still some work to do, but we are really pleased with it so far.

We are going to start work on the kitchen soon-- we finally saved up the cash to get it all done! Very exciting. I hope to post a bit more on here shortly, but we can't make any promises... the whole blog thing is pretty difficult when you spend all of your spare time doing the things you're supposed to write about.